- [Narrator] In the days of film it was pretty easy…to understand if you needed medium format…rather than 35 millimeter film.…Of course, a piece of 35 millimeter film and a piece of…120 film both can use the same emulsions so you're not…actually going to get a difference in tonality,…dynamic range, any of those things if you're using…the same chemicals on each piece.…What the bigger piece of film got you was the ability to…enlarge more, or not have to enlarge as much.…Medium format captured a lot more detail than 35 millimeter…and of course because of the different frame size you had…a different type of dynamic range and so on and so forth.…

With digital it's not so cut and dry because we don't…enlarge, we don't project light through a negative to create…a positive image, we enlarge arithmetically,…we enlarge by rearranging the spacing in the pixels.…Dynamic range much more complicated because it depends…on the value of a bunch of different numbers across a grid.…It's just not as easy to say go to medium format and you'll…

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Released

3/19/2018

Over the last year or so, a new category of digital camera has appeared-the medium-format mirrorless camera. While medium format used to represent the pinnacle of digital image quality, over the years, technical breakthroughs have dramatically narrowed the quality gap between high-end SLRs and medium format. In this advanced photography course, Ben Long shares insights on what this new category is for, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this type of camera. He wraps up by analyzing who would benefit from making the switch to a medium-format camera. Throughout the course, Ben takes an agnostic approach to the subject, discussing the merits of the category rather than a particular model. Learn about medium-format lenses, noise and medium format, the medium-format look, and more.